Art.

Bio-pics

Moma Shares Picasso's Life As Told In His Own Brush Strokes

NEW YORK — Pablo Picasso left an autobiography. The Museum of Modern Art is now sharing it with us.

As befits the greatest artist of the 20th Century, this telling of Picasso's life story is not an assemblage of words but one of fantastic pictures--Picasso's portraits.

On view at MOMA through Sept. 17, "Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation" is the first comprehensive exhibition of the master's portraits--embracing his artistic career and personal life from age 14 to the last months before his death at age 91 in 1973.

Including many of his most important paintings, these are very intimate and intensely personal images, many loving, some hateful, some cosmic. The subjects are his family, friends, colleagues and children, but most especially, his women. Wives, mistresses, unrequited loves, significant mentors and passing fancies, all made here immortal.

Punctuating the exhibition are his self portraits--particularly at the end, where perhaps the most monumental ego of the century confronts the incontrovertible fact of his imminent mortality.

Of the 221 paintings and works on paper on display, nearly half have never been shown in the U.S. before and many are being put before the public for the very first time. MOMA is the only U.S. venue for the show; a smaller version is to open at the Grand Palais in Paris in October.

Organized by William Rubin, retired MOMA director of painting and sculpture, as a career finale, this is not a show of portraits as Rembrandt or John Singer Sargent made portraits.

"Picasso realized that the sense of presence in traditional portraits had less to do with the personality of the sitter than with the contribution of the artist," observed Rubin, who first met Picasso three years before his death. "Portraits had traditionally served to memorialize their subjects, but Picasso (an avid photographer) felt that in the modern era the camera could best satisfy those needs to record and describe. In the way photography assumed those functions, it was seen by Picasso as an important liberating factor for modern art, and especially for the modern idea of portraiture. Painters were freed to concentrate on what photographers could not do and to turn the criteria of the portrait more sharply away from objective description toward the expression of the artist's personal responses to the subject."

Arranged largely in a chronological succession (with wall texts much too small for so well attended an exhibition), the works make clear the error of the common misconception that Picasso was an artist who moved from "period" to "period" and from technique to technique, ever putting approaches and concepts behind him as he turned to explore the new and unknown.

Explore he did, more boldly and energetically than anyone. But his past techniques, ideas and discoveries were not discarded but retained and employed, like weapons in an arsenal, throughout his career. The cubism he perfected early in his career can be found in some of the most emotionally intense portraits of his maturity. Realism intruded in his later years as well.

His earliest works, of course, are the most representational and of the greatest biographical significance. His portraits of father, mother, sisters, proud young self and his first love, Fernande Olivier, are all distinguished achievements of representational art. He was a brilliant draftsman even in his early 20s and obviously would have enjoyed great reputation had he never turned to modernism and all that followed.

Though a difficult, self-centered man, often a brute with women, he made many friends, kept them for years if not life, and painted and drew them with absorption and affection. In this exhibition are nine portraits of his friend the poet, pornographer and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire, who died of influenza in 1918.

Picasso's closest and earlier Parisian friend, poet and novelist Andre Salmon, whose radical thinking and appreciation of African art were a great influence on the painter, is represented here in abstract, conceptualized image.

Of the legion of women in his life, three dominate here as they did in actuality--first wife Olga Khokhlova, mistress Marie-Therese Walter and mistress and intellectual mentor Dora Maar, remembered from the "Weeping Woman" Picasso exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer.

A high-born dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's celebrated Ballet Russe, Olga first met Picasso as co-contributors to sets and design for the Erik Satie ballet "Parade," in 1917. They were married the next year and she bore him a son, but their temperaments clashed unforgivingly. By 1923, his portraits of her were coming to resemble either other women or, as Rubin puts it, "a shrieking Surreal termagant or bony mantis-headed `Devouring Woman.' "

Olga died of cancer in 1951 but she and Picasso had legally separated in 1935, the year his young mistress Marie-Therese bore him a daughter out of wedlock.